Archive for January, 2018

When Don Horn of Triangle Productions went about putting together a world premiere about the first recognized fully transgender person in the United States, people asked him about the individual, guessing that it was 1970s tennis player Renee Richards.

“No, this person came way before Renee Richards,” Horn says. “Nobody knows about this person.”

I don’t know a damned thing about 1970s tennis player Renee Richards (though the name is vaguely familiar.) I do know Christine Jorgensen.

It is because tennis is alien to me, but I would know the focal point between Richard Nixon and Ed Wood.

In his exit, Steve Bannon assailed the Trump administration as now purely beholden to Davos — I think a sliding away from that old nationalist big works products mixed as it were with the building of The Wall toward the end of an upper class tax cut. It’s interesting to note that, naturally, the reception at Davos is… hostile. In and out.

And sure, they’d be out with any American president, and Bush with Iraq. This one’s notable in that Trump’s big faux pas in the Davos with Davos is an “anti-globalism” protectionist stance… so where do the protesters come about on the issue of the neo-liberalism globalist order?

It’s also interesting to note the protesters message conflicting with that, in a sense, with noted member of the “Resistance” — if any politician can be called that — Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown — a man who, it is rumored is — along with every other elected Democratic official — may be running for president or vice president or has his name being floated out there because there’s no one else anyone can think of…

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, applauded this week’s decision on tariffs and said he had been dismayed when Trump delayed decisions about whether to impose restrictions on steel and aluminum imports.

Notably, he likes the protection on solar panels.

Of course, this is the policy prescription that won Trump OhioPennsylvaniaMichiganWisconsin, and thus the election…

(whistling because no one likes to suggest Trump won with policy prescriptions of any sort ascribed to traditional Democratic policies.)

Eight years ago, when North Korea made an appearance in the World Cup and proceeded to turn in a piss poor performance, the news seemed to suggest retributions to the athletes. Presumably, when the Unified Korean teams come to play, either the South Korean athletes will be covering well enough for the North Korean athletes that a bar will be met so that the People’s athletes won’t be embarrassing the People’s Republic, or in whatever agreement that made this passable —

— the host South Koreans as well the Olympic committee wanting to diffuse political tensions and provide a storyline for public consumption, so a deal is brokered —

this was dealt away with.

Or perhaps Kim Jong Un is more sports sympathetic than Kim Jong Il. (Though, the Rodman lead basketball team had to tie the North Korean team, for North Korean consumption.)

At first it strikes me as positive — if slight. Open up what channels of communication you can. (What? Didn’t a Ping Pong competition open up China? (Or, according to the late 1970s Hal Lindsey book — The 1980s — Countdown to Armageddon — put us on the path to armageddon.) Though don’t pretend it’s more than it is. (Yes. The Leader wants the country to put the thoughts on the war on hold, and prepare for the glorious day when South Korea will be lead by him as too well.)

But then consider this problem: there are South Korean athletes … now being cut… from rosters… to make room for North Koreans.

The Nation covers the growth spurt of the “Democratic Socialists of America“, what with ten (chapters or members?) in the Tri Cities alone. The moderates are working with the radicals and vice versa…

People are subsuming their discomfort with, say, a commune to campaign for single-payer. Marxists are swallowing their discomfort with, say, our participation in the Democratic primary.

Of course, no one has too much problem with communes popping up. Much.

The red baited candidates pulling forth…

Toward the end of the race, flyers were distributed that showed Carter’s face alongside Lenin’s and Stalin’s, which Christine Riddiough, a 71-year-old IT professional and a member of DSA’s electoral committee, described to me as an attempt at red-baiting.

Unfair. No one in DSA is comparing anyone to Lenin or Stalin. It’s Mao and Trotsky!

Over the summer, three loose coalitions formed, each bearing its own program: Momentum, Praxis, and Unity. When I asked the members of the groups how they differed, I was told that Momentum consisted of “soft Trotskyites” and was the most explicitly Marxist, oriented toward the campaign for single-payer and other overarching policy initiatives. Praxis was “Maoism lite,” with a “from-the-ground-up” approach [Just like the governing approach of the historical Mao!] and the heaviest focus on social justice and questions of identity. *
[…] Both Momentum and Praxis consist predominantly of young people, while the third coalition, Unity, was the least ideological, with an emphasis that was described to me as “old-DSA-ish stuff” (i.e., cooperation with the Democratic Party) and “reform and realignment.” Leftovers from a pre-Trump DSA... tools of the Democratic Party, Mo and Prax probably think.

We get into debates if people want to see us. If we have someone who’s popular, who people want to see. We get a good celebrity in 2020, we’re in the debates. We get someone like, I don’t know, people talk about Mark Cuban, I don’t know if he’s a libertarian. But whatever, someone like him, or Vince Vaughn, Kurt Russell, The Rock.

Granted, the real third party — the Greens — skipped out on the chance for Roseanne Barr, but it didn’t really work for the fourth party that ran her in 2012.

And trying to assess the large groupings of libertarian celebrities — I must say I must be missing the great public adoration and fanfare that will be driving Penn Jilette to the media firestorm he’s aiming for here — the other noted celebrity that pops to mind, Drew Carey, also falls flat.
I wonder, though. Caitlyn Jenner. I don’t know if she’s aptable to switch parties — she has been the most prominent trans-gendered Republican out there, and I don’t know if her transgendered politics squares with a libertarian stance which would, for instance, not want tax payer money going to any gender reassignment therapy and on to employee mandates and on or what her “small gummint” politics are otherwise — but I do know that she has voiced disgust at her party and Trump. And she would do the best job in driving media attention — more so than Penn Jilette or Drew Carey.

And adding more fractures to a fractious Libertarian Party… and his approach to “alt right” “white nationalist” would be libertarians…

How can I turn you if I can’t talk to you? Come, even white nationalists, come. If I can turn you, I’ll turn you. My hero is that guy Daryl Davis. You know that guy? He’s one of my brothers who was out there trying to get KKK members to turn. And he keeps their hoods as a trophy. He’s turned like 44 of them in 30 years. That’s my hero.The vast majority of those guys are not Nazis. They’re guys who are lost. There’s a couple guys who are Nazis; there’s always a couple of ringleaders. Those guys are never going to change, no matter what you do. But the big chunk of people who just think this is the right answer now? Turn them. That may take a month. That may take a year. It might take a hundred years. I don’t care …

[Reason interviewer Matt Welch] So if someone says, “Hey, you know what? My version of libertarianism is I think people should be free to cluster, and I’m going to join a white nationalist community, and I’m going to be a member of the L.P. executive board”?[Sharpe] Good luck. If you win the election, I’m fine with it. Look, remember something—in a libertarian society, you can have enclaves of socialists, enclaves of communists, as long as it’s voluntary when people try to leave.

After all… we all believe in Communes.

* Worth pointing out, whatever the connection to Chairman Mao, the action taking by the meowists described here is a productive and useful one.

A bumper sticker. “Who Is John Galt?” By it is another bumper sticker. “Impeach the Asshole”. (Or… something of the ilk. Not the Trump identified “ITMFAA”).

It’s an interesting query, because we have the sticker id-ed as belonging to a Libertarian, whether he slides in as a “socially liberal Republican” (definition of s-l term probably shifted since the overall phrase was coined) type, and one who’d just as soon swallow up a de-regulatory parts of Trump with the tax-cut the bottom line for some form of support, or he views him as just as socialistic as all his predecessors, I don’t know.

It could be a bumper sticker message left over from previous administrations, and one in perpetuity, until and probably past the day a Libertarian gets elected… a message for the overall disaffected.

National March for Impeachment, Sat Jan 20, 12:30 pm, Terry Schrunk Plaza, 431 SW MadisonHosted by International League of Peoples’ Struggle-PDX and Direct Action Alliance, this march will kick off from Terry Schrunk Plaza and wind up god knows where. Come on out and join the national movement to ITMFA.

The march gets mixed into the weekend hooplah with the annual anniversary of the women’s march — split into a moderate and radical faction it seems.

I’m puzzling about the impeachment marching. If it’s laser focused on issues that amount to impeaching a president, or if it somewhat lumps policy issues of intense disagreements into the fray — say… oh… abortion and whatever wall building that’s left in the Trump arsenal…

… on over to those anti gay wedding cake designers…

The name suggests something of a worker’s vanguard. It’d work for just about any president.

If I see this correctly, we had… oh, Charles Taylor of one party, who ran on this…

In 1997, during a period of peace, Charles Taylor, a warlord, became president, having made it clear that he would go back to war if not elected. Supporters chanted, “He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I’ll vote for him.”

Next up, the reformer on the other party… Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Then… er… a football player? Who…

Mr Weah is idolised, particularly among the young—and more than half the electorate is under 33. He lost to the current president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, in 2005.

And the new asset of all political hopefuls…

Yet there are doubts about the kind of leader Mr Weah will be. Since his election as a senator in 2014, he has rarely attended parliament. Nor has he introduced or co-sponsored any legislation. Mr Weah’s relative lack of education, though, only seems to make him more popular. His supporters see the former slum-dweller as one of them—a champion from their streets.

But he won over the old supporters of Taylor due to having Taylor’s wife as running mate.

The incoming vice-president, Jewel Howard-Taylor, is a popular senator who once tried to make homosexuality punishable by death. She is also Mr Taylor’s ex-wife, which helped attract voters who still support the former tyrant (who is now in prison in Britain for war crimes committed in neighbouring Sierra Leone).

… still holding to a version of the “Yah! Killed my folks” line, I see…

I. Mae Brussel, the world’s greatest single conspiracy buff, has insisted, over various underground radio stations, that virtually all the terrorist Left is a secret C.I.A. operation to discredit the rest of the Left. More recently, the U.S. Labor Party has taken up the same model and is accusing almost everybody in the Left of being a government agent working to discredit the Left. Although neither Mae Brussell nor the U.S.L.P. are any better at preparing an evidential case than the late Joseph McCarthy, the Watergate investigations revealed that the FBI’s “COINTELPRO” operation did involve agents provocateurs and attempts to divide the Left by inciting crime and spreading paranoia. Maybe all the paranoids are right, after all. — Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, 1977

II. At long last… a … uniform? That the members of the org can dawn when they do their PO Box tour (or wherever it is their deployments are in the Trump Era.)

So, when someone accuses them of spouting out goobley — gook, or asks them to clarify what it is the “B-12″ incident, they may just point to their shirt in a state of smug self-assured over-confidence. How this wins over the masses, I do not know.
(Yes. These things probably belong to a motorcycle club.)

III. Stop me if you’ve ever heard this one.
A one time member. Left a once solid organization, the Larouchies, dedicated at one time to fighting the good fight. Or, was when s/he joined. Now, it’s sad to see what it has become — truly deplorable — as a totally different organization than when I was a part of it…

… when it never would have worked to put themselves as supporters of a world-paradigm shifting Trump administration… and were all about… er… doubling the squares?

There is one novel and interesting wrinkle in this testimony from a recent ex-member. A reformation past the scandals of the 80s. Given the word in the org continues to portray it all as political persecution with time served by political prisoners — lead by the most feared of all political prisoners — Larouche himself — it does make for a pretty lame glasnost.

But, as it were… no one can quit now. How else are they going to succeed at their stated goal of ending geopolitics for once and for all, if all the foot soldiers disperse into… geo and politics?

IV. I see a decent uptick of features in mainstream media on the “New Silk Road” — China’s development of high powered transportation hubs to connect to major European and Asian ports. It’s not without its birth-pains.
One focus, running counter to Larouche propaganda, is the irony of China seeking a larger role in the world as the US (under the aeges of the current president) seeks a smaller role.

V. 2 time Democratic congressional district of the Texas Fighting 22nd, and forcer of a primary run-off for US Senate seat…
… The most successful Larouche politician of the Obama Era, though no one who got even close to winning…
has pulled up the stakes, and fled the Democratic Party to run as an independent. Into the 9th District.

By some accounts, the Democratic Party is actually fielding a challenger against Pete Sessions — staring at the rejiggered map of 2016 which lead some suburban areas to become more Democratic and some rural areas more Republican in keeping with opinions on Trump — and had Texas closer than Ohio for Clinton. Yet, Kesha doesn’t want to be a factor in the district that, theoretically, she has acquired a base with?Hm. Among the items on her campaign platform were opposition to fracking. Surely this will be at the center of her campaign?

” High speed rail takes citizens across great distances in minimal times. Manufacturing is accomplished on modern platforms. Space exploration has been made a priority. Most importantly, the people are optimistic about the future; new ideas are the subject of impassioned debate and discussion. This is a project long envisioned and campaigned for by Lyndon and Helga LaRouche. President Trump, whom Congressman Green wants to impeach, is exploring how the United States can benefit from this Great Project.

Just as a vote for Rogers was a vote for the impeachment of Obama, a vote for Rogers is now a vote against the impeachment of Trump. Got that? And if that doesn’t float your boat… maybe this other one might win you over: A vote for Kesha Rogers is a vote to end geopolitics.

Today we report that a Senate committee is even seriously listening to complaints from extreme fringe group, the Citizens Electoral Council, traditionally connected to bizarre American conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche, that the government could commandeer bank deposits.

There was another protester standing in the parking lot handing out documents from the LaRouche Political Action Committee attacking Robert Mueller, showing a picture of Mueller side by side with the burning Twin Towers after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and urging people to go online to find out more.

Look it up, and you’ll find out more at… er… lar-pac?

The U.S. House of Representatives plans a nearly unheard-of five-day session in the week of Dec. 18-22, after activists with the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee distributed a dossier titled “Robert Mueller Is an Amoral Legal Assassin: He Will Do His Job If You Let Him” to every office in the House of Representatives today.

IX. “Weirdest Presidential Candidates“. A few celebrity ones thrown in there… Jello Biafro. I always had a soft spot for Hagelin — probably in the same vein as Victoria Woodhull..

Erstwhere

We are doomed. when a number of Hawaiians knew that they weren’t going to die in a nuclear explosion, they rushed to the Internet to watch pornography to calm themselves. They didn’t go find a wife, a partner, a friend. They went to their computer and, alone, watched strangers screwing.